Making landscape pictures with tissue paper for backgrounds

I’ve done a number of posts here on the blog with activities that teach horizon line and basic perspective issues.

This is another great activity with a twist since here we used tissue paper to make the backgrounds.(first graders)

I have tried to impress on the children (not always so successfully I must say) that there should be no white space in a landscape picture. When you look anywhere outside or inside, there is always something there, not white space. (which even many adults seem to have a hard time realizing).

For this art project I told them to draw a line where they want their horizon line to be.

I hung up pictures with various sky colors to get them to begin to think beyond blue.

They had to choose what kind of sky they were going to create and then to choose the right color tissue paper.

Of course, most ended up choosing blue anyway.

I had them cover their space above their horizon lines with their sky colors. I told them it would work better if they ripped them into smaller pieces and that works even better when they are using more than one color.

They then got to cover their bottom space with their ground color. (mostly green) One child did add some brown below the green.

This child added in a few colors for her sunset sky making it a bit more 3 dimensional.

This was one session only.

For the next session I decided that the concepts I wanted to get across would be better learned if I limited their objects to one type of outdoor object. I chose trees and hung up many different pictures of trees for them to copy or gain inspiration from.

I gave them plain white pieces of paper, markers, oil pastels and markers and told them to create many different types of trees. I also told them to make sure there were trees of different sizes as well.

When they were all done creating their trees, they had to cut them out and place them in different places in their pictures.

There were a few things that they had to look out for.

Larger trees go in the front

Small trees go further back but, must be resting on the ground or else they will look like they are floating in air

It was not a problem for their trees to stick up into the sky. That is a normal way things look.

The further up on the paper they put their trees, the further back the trees were in the picture

If they wanted to add other items as this child did with clouds that was fine as well.

This child’s work was supposed to depict a half night and half day scene.

I love these mixed media projects because they are projects that take a while and creating objects with a marker or pastel is easier than painting them onto a landscape making it easier to get richer looking landscape pictures.